James Baldwin Quotes

[In 1955] It is precisely this black – white experience which may prove of indispensable value to us in the world we face today. This world is white no longer, and it will never be white again.
James Baldwin

If black English isn’t a language, then tell me, what is?
James Baldwin

If the language was not my own, it might be the fault of the language; but it might also be my fault. Perhaps the language was not my own because I have never attempted to use it, I had only learned to imitate it.
James Baldwin

[On language it] Is the most vivid and crucial key to identity: It reveals the private identity, and connects one with, or divorces one from, the larger, public, or communal identity.
James Baldwin

I think all theories are suspect, that the finest principles may have to be modified or may even be pulverized by the demand’s of life.
James Baldwin

[In 1938] What I saw around me that that summer in Harlem was what I had always seen; nothing had changed. But now, without any warning, the whores and the pimps and racketeers on the Avenue had become a personal menace. It had not before occurred to me that I could become one of them, but now I realized that we had been produced by the same circumstances.
James Baldwin

Out of a deep, adolescent cunning I do not pretend to understand, I realized immediately that I could not remain in the church merely as another worshipper. I would have to give myself something to do, in order not to be too bored and find myself among all the wretched unsaved of the Avenue.
James Baldwin

The fear that I heard in my father’s voice… when he realized that I really believed I could do anything a white boy could do, and had every intention of proving it, was not at all like the fear I heard when one of us was ill or had fallen down the stairs or strayed too far from the house. It was another fear, a fear that the child, in challenging the white world’s assumptions, was putting himself in the path of destruction.
James Baldwin

It is easy to proclaim all souls equal in the sight of God, it is hard to make men equal on earth, in the sight of men.
James Baldwin

It is the Negro, of course, who is presumed to have become equal – an achievement that not only proves the comforting fact that perseverance has no color but also overwhelmingly corroborates the white man’s sense of his own value.
James Baldwin

The Negro came to the white man for a roof or for five dollars or for a letter to the judge; the white man came to the Negro for love. But he was not often able to give what he came seeking. The price was too high; he had too much to lose.
Unless he becomes a man – becomes equal – it is also impossible for one to love him.
James Baldwin

People always seem to band together in accordance to a principle… that releases them from personal responsibility.
James Baldwin

The price of the liberation of the white people is the liberation of the blacks – the total liberation, in cites, in the towns, before the law, and in the mind.
James Baldwin

It is the responsibility of free men to trust and to celebrate what is constant… and to apprehend the nature of change, to be able and willing to change.
James Baldwin

Renewal becomes impossible if one supposes things to be constant that are not – safety… or money, or power. One clings then to chimeras, by which one can only be betrayed, and the entire hope – the entire possibility – of freedom disappears.
James Baldwin

In spite of everything, there was in the life I fled a zest and a joy and a capacity for facing and surviving disaster that are very moving and very rare.
James Baldwin

They [my childhood friends] still believed in the Lord, but I had quarreled with him and offended him and walked out of his house.
James Baldwin

To hurl away, for a moment of ease, the glories of eternity!
James Baldwin

I knew that what I wanted to do in the theatre, was to recreate moments I remembered as a boy preacher, to involve the people, even against their will, to shake them up, and hopefully to change them.
James Baldwin

We have to make our own definitions and begin to rule the world that way.
James Baldwin

White people talk about Alabama as though they had no Harlem.
James Baldwin

I was not born to be what someone else said I was. I was not born to be defined by someone else, but by myself and myself only.
James Baldwin

I hit the streets when I was seven. It was the middle of the Depression and I learned how to sing out of hard experience.
James Baldwin

[In Switzerland] I was working on my first novel – I thought I would never be able to finish it – and I finally realized that one of the reasons that I couldn’t finish this novel was that I was ashamed of where I came from and where I had been. I was ashamed of the life in the Negro church, ashamed of my father, ashamed of the Blues, ashamed of Jazz, and of course, ashamed of watermelon: all of those stereotypes that the country inflicts on Negroes, that we all eat watermelon or we all do nothing but sing the blues. Well, I was afraid of all that; and I ran from it.
James Baldwin

I realized that I had acquired so many affectations, had told myself so many lies, that I really had buried myself beneath a whole fantastic image of myself which wasn’t mine, but white people’s image of me.
James Baldwin

This is a country that belongs equally to us both. One has got to live together here or else there won’t be any country.
James Baldwin

No matter who says what, in fact, Negroes and whites in this country are related to each other.
James Baldwin

You don’t make resolutions about something you are going to do next year. No! You decide to write a book: the book may be finished twenty years from now, but you’ve got to start it now.
James Baldwin

The human fact is this: that one cannot escape anything one has done. One has got to pay for it. You either pay for it willingly or pay for it unwillingly.
James Baldwin

If I hadn’t gone away, I would never have been able to see it; and if I was unable to see it, I would never have been able to forgive it.
James Baldwin

Education demands a certain daring, a certain independence of mind. You have to teach some people to think; and in order to teach some people to think, you have to teach them to think about everything. There mustn’t be something they cannot think about. If there is one thing they can not think about, very shortly they can’t think about anything.
James Baldwin

You think your pains and heartbreaks are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who have ever been alive.
James Baldwin

Not everything that is faced can be changed; but nothing can be changed until it is faced.
James Baldwin